Gerry Adams challenged over shooting.

John Mooney
A Dublin family has challenged Sinn Fein to prove its opposition to IRA criminality by denouncing a leading figure in the republican movement who allegedly organised a gun attack which has left a young father in a coma.

The family of Robert Delaney, 28, who was shot at his Tallaght home last October, wants Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein party president, to publicly condemn the shooting.

Terry Delaney, the man’s father and a trade union official, has accused republican paramilitaries of organising the attack. He believes a senior IRA figure from south Dublin was responsible and that witnesses are being intimidated.

The case is similar to that of Robert McCartney, 33, whose murder by an IRA gang in Belfast in 2005 caused outrage.

“I am asking Gerry Adams to make a public statement on Robert’s shooting,” Delaney said. “I want Sinn Fein to take a stance on what happened to Robert. It has been suggested to my family that people associated with the IRA were behind the gun attack which has left my son in a coma. I want Adams to tell republicans to pass whatever information they have to the gardai and to condemn the attack.”

The father-of-two was shot in the face as he looked out of an upstairs window at his home in Russell Rise, Tallaght, at 6.30am last October. A gunman rang the doorbell of the apartment and fired a shot when Robert Delaney opened a window to see who was calling.

Detectives investigating the shooting believe the victim, a postman, was targeted because he tried to stop a fight in a pubsome weeks earlier. The prime suspect is a former IRA hardliner. He was a prominent figure in the Southern Command and was an associate of Adams and Thomas “Slab” Murphy, the former IRA chief-of-staff.

“The effect of this shooting on my family has been devastating,” said Delaney, whose own family has a republican background. “Robert has been in a coma for over three months now and his prognosis is not good. The doctors do not believe that he will make a recovery and this is tearing my family apart.

“We are maintaining a vigil beside his bed but he just lies there in a vegetative state. His children don’t fully understand what happened because they are so young and we are all trying to shield them from the news.

“My father was involved in Sinn Fein during the 1950s and Robert’s great-uncle, Gearoid O’Broin, was interned during the 1950s because he was the Officer Commanding of the IRA.”

Pat Rabbitte, a local Labour TD and the party’s spokesman on justice, said: “If it is true that senior republicans in the Dublin area are believed to have knowledge of this crime, then Sinn Fein is obliged to investigate the matter and bring any information they have to the gardai.”

Dawn Doyle, a spokeswoman for Adams, said that the party condemned Delaney’s shooting: “Anyone with any information should come forward and pass it to the gardai. There may be some belief that those allegedly involved in this crime may be republicans but they have nothing to do with Sinn Fein.”